Das Interview wurde auf Englisch geführt.
Christiane Büchner (CB): I would like to start with my experience of watching your film for the first time. I understand it's about a river and about becoming part of dreams. And then there is a woman, we see her sitting, and you explain what you want to learn from her. And I think: ‘Wow, this sounds complicated. What will she answer?’ And then she answers so distinctly and beautifully. How did you manage with this rather abstract concept to get to the core, the heart and the inner world of all these women you met during your long search for this film?
Kristina Mikhailova (KM): For me, it was also a big surprise that the women I interviewed became, at some point, so open to my idea. I set the rule that I will not prepare questions or decide on the structure of the interview in advance. All interviews were inspired by the energy of the women I spoke with. And this approach worked well because when someone, especially a woman, especially a woman in Kazakhstan, feels that so much care is taken – we scheduled two hours for each interview, we discussed and chose the location – then she settles in and starts to talk, and feels that someone is actually listening to her. Finally! I guess this approach was the key. During the interview, I tried not to invite any other people to the set. It was only me, her, and the camera. And it became a really intimate conversation between the two of us. My whole life I had been worrying that maybe I am a boring person to talk to, because my main concern is to listen. With RIVER DREAMS, it worked perfectly, because my talent to listen became visible. I was super interested in every girl's story, and we really went deep. I interviewed more than 100 girls, and unfortunately only fifteen of them have become part of this film. But most of them said that for them it was a transformative experience, to talk to me and to realize things about themselves. To answer your question, it was a journey that was absolutely experimental, but worked well because the initial idea was to make a film full of girls, with their perspective and their agency, their ability to make choices and act on their own terms. When they felt that they have agency, they opened up a lot, which I'm really grateful for.
Gaby Babić (GB): For me, your film is mainly a film about violence against women and girls. That's how I see it, besides all its beauty and talking about the river metaphor and dreams. Was there an initial starting point for you to feel the urge to make this film? Because when you talk about the woman who was killed by her husband, the politician, this is very crucial to the film.
KM: We actually did not start this film with the idea to tell something about violence against women. But between two shooting periods, this murder case happened: the ex-Minister of Economics of Kazakhstan beat his wife to death [in November 2023]. This was a transformative experience for me because over the course of three months I barely slept. Every day there was a new live broadcast of the trial online. We were discussing this everywhere, in the taxi, in the nail salon, in the shops – everywhere! So during this time I felt that I have no right to escape this topic when I make a film about women. When the second shooting period of my film started, I was not sure how to include Saltanat [Nukenova]’s death. But then all the girls mentioned this case by themselves. And that helped me to realize that I do not victimize them, just for my benefits as a director, when I bring up this topic in the film. I was just open to what the girls were telling me. Talking about violence in Kazakhstan in general is not only about physical violence or abuse within families. It's also about psychological violence, which is happening on many different levels, which me and my producer experienced ourselves. We were filming for five years, and you can't even imagine how many times we faced misogynistic approaches in different institutions in Kazakhstan. State institutions, private institutions, business partners whom we tried to approach, everywhere. And what was our solution to resist this violence? We stayed as gentle and polite as possible, and were not violent against these people in return. It's about being vulnerable and not being afraid to show vulnerability. They were fighting us, they told us: ‘You're stupid girls. You cannot succeed.’ We said: ‘Okay, we will find another way’, and we did.
They told us: ‘You're stupid girls. You cannot succeed.’ We said: ‘Okay, we will find another way’, and we did.
All the girls in the film, we call them ‘River Girls’, taught me a lot, because all of them were doing such different things in their lives. I was listening very carefully to how they struggled and how they succeeded. They were open and they shared. Of course, this film looks like a film about girls, about women. But for me, it's also about being human. People who advised me during the editing, were often trying to edit out the men from the film: ‘We should kill the men’. Yes, we took out some of them, but still, a few of them stayed because I wanted to give them a space as well.
CB: There is one man who said something that even gave me another understanding of your project. He's an engineer, and talks about the river, and he said, ‘I coped with the river like with any other woman.’ And only then did I understand that ‘river’ in Russian is female. In German, it's male. There the idea of a river being a woman is even a very realistic metaphor, in a way. There are very interesting aspects of the men’s ideas about a river and about the woman that is embodied in the idea of being a river.
KM: For me the men are embodying what the girls are talking about. When they talk about violence, about resistance. Everything that they say, we can imagine or relate to, intellectually. But when you see the violent guy and you can see his eyes, you can also see how tired they are from work… The engineer you are referring to, he told us that he hadn’t slept for three days because the construction of the bridge was really difficult, and he was in charge of many things. Deep inside, he's a good person, but he still treats women as if men need to ‘cope’ with them. How can you even use such a word towards a woman, and especially a woman you share your life with? The shot where all the men are standing together was important to me. At that moment, I felt a huge love towards them. I spent maybe three days in that quarry. And these are mostly poor people. Every day we were shooting how they were working under terrible conditions. I know that they are from the village where I am also from and they provide for the whole family. So I understand these men as well. At the same time, they can do physical violence to their wives when they are too tired. There is a connection between the violence in the family and the conditions in which they are working. It was for me also about the social injustice inside Kazakhstan, and you can easily see in the film how people live here, just ordinary people on the outskirts of Almaty. This is how most people live in Kazakhstan. So the river is a metaphor for a woman, but it can also relate to men. As you said, in German, the river is male. Because when you go with the river through the landscapes, you meet a lot of different things on your way and you're struggling. But the point of the river is that it continues on its way and ends up somewhere in the flood, which I show at the end of the film.
GB: I wanted to ask you to elaborate on the layer of ecology in your film.
KM: That’s a tricky subject, because when we tried to pitch the project to the Kazakhstan National Film Fund, they were not happy about all the women in the film. But every year we receive a list of topics that the film fund prefers us to work on. I was searching which of the topics I could fit in and found ‘ecology’. I was like, ‘Yeah, I can easily go in that direction deeply.’ The first idea was to give voice to the river, and this is a post-humanistic approach, which I tried to keep secret, like the women and the fact that the film talks about society and politics. In Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, rivers are so crucial in terms of the water crisis and in terms of our traditions, because we sometimes have large empty areas without any source of life. Rivers are one of the main sources of life.
GB: Maybe you can tell us something about this specific river, how you shot this film and how you met all these women along this riverside?
KM: Yes, of course. That was a huge, huge adventure. I was just curious in the beginning, how one river looks like from its beginning to the end. And this particular river is a very, very humble river. No one ever thinks about this river as something important. When I started to pitch the project in Kazakhstan, my Almaty colleagues asked me, ‘Oh, you're doing a documentary about a river, which river?’ They were expecting the biggest river, the most beautiful river, the river that has something special. I was like, ‘Oh, it's about Aksay River.’ They called it a bit humiliating ‘Aksayka’, which means something like ‘Shitty River’. I was happy about these comments because when you make a film about something that is so ordinary, that means a lot of other rivers will be able to relate. They will say: ‘Yes, Aksayka is our sister’. That idea of the sisterhood was really empowering for me. I first traveled along the Aksay by myself, only equipped with a small camera. You can imagine, a girl like me, not too big, not too strong, traveling alone. A few really scary in- cidents happened - like when men were trying to catch me, to rape me or something like that. In a few situations they succeeded in causing psychological harm, in a few other situations nothing physical happened thanks to my quick reaction, but I still felt really very scared. I was walking, trying to find locations for my shootings, and at the same time I felt that as a woman, I should better stay home. All the way I carried pepper spray for my protection and a big stick. Why, as a woman, should I feel like this when I just want to walk along a river?
Everything you can say about a seven-year-long romantic relationship with anyone, you can say about my relationship with the river.
My team traveled along the whole river again together. Of course, it's a big difference when you travel alone or with a crew of fifteen people. We found that the river has a character, which is really fascinating, mesmerizing… Someone asked me, ‘What relationship do you have with the river?’ I said, ‘We are lovers.’ Everything you can say about a seven-year-long romantic relationship with anyone, you can say about my relationship with the river. That's why the river became a person for me. I don't know if it's the same for the viewers or for my crew, but for me, it's a person. I'm really happy that maybe if the post-humanistic world will become stronger, we might find some AI techniques that enable us to listen to what a river actually says. In that case, I will show my film first to the river to get feedback. The most precious feedback will be that one for me.
CB: Did you find the women, your protagonists, all along the river or did you also invite women from Almaty, for example?
KM: Yes, both. First we did castings along the river. That was really funny because we put up old-fashioned posters on the trees, on the streets in the villages. For the people who live in those villages, it was really surprising. The announcement said, ‘We are looking for girls who feel like a river.’ It was very direct. So, the first decision was with the girls themselves. Do they want to come to the casting? A lot of girls came. With some of them, I just did a small casting, with others, longer interviews. Some I invited to a test shooting, and somehow we ended up with two hours of footage. For each girl it turned out differently. The posters helped a lot. They were a performance in themselves and entertaining for the people living next to the river. All the villagers came along to our shootings all the time, and they were happy to share, happy to help. They even stopped the final school celebration for 20 minutes because those filmmakers were doing something about the river and needed silence. And they were happy that we were doing something about the Aksay river because they could not imagine that it could be a topic for a film. They were like, ‘Oh, what a surprise. Why do you do that? What's your idea?’ When you ask me what's the idea, I will tell you in a particular way. But for each person, I need to read their faces very fast. And to explain it in a way that the person will understand best. I gave maybe 100 pitches to different people by the river to explain what my film is about, which made me feel really confident of the idea by the end. I also invited some girls from Almaty for different events, and I felt strongly that they have a river inside. With all my invitations, I made maybe only one mistake: I invited a girl for a big interview and after the interview, I saw that she's not a river, she's a volcano.
GB: Can you tell us a bit more about the femicide of Saltanat Nukenova that you mentioned? I know that this case was really very impactful. What happened and why was it so important?
KM: The ex-Minister of Economics beat his wife in the center of our capital Astana. He beat her to death, but she didn't pass away immediately. She spent some time in that bar being unconscious. He called a fortune-teller instead of the emergency to ask whether his wife was alive or dead, he called a prostitute to have fun with her in the meantime. He was trying to hide his wife’s body with an accomplice. All of these people gave testimony in court. Later, of course, the government tried to erase the digital traces of what had happened. It's a huge tragedy. At the same time, it's Kafkaesque – and a Kazakhstan reality. Every new detail, which we found out during the three months of the online trial, was shocking for us. We couldn’t believe it. I had nightmares every night about this happening not only to me, not only to my friends, but actually to every woman in Kazakhstan. Only talking about myself, there were six different attempts of rape towards me, which I escaped in different ways, but still. When I ask other women in Kazakhstan, ‘Were you attacked as well?’ They always have a story to tell. It's just a matter of how violent it was. That's why we were all relieved in some way when this case became so big. We could finally talk openly. Because before that case, if you said something like that, openly, in public, half of the audience would judge you and say, ‘You know, you are dramatizing’, or ‘you are overreacting’. Even in the case with Saltanat and her husband, the ex-minister, we still find comments in social media, where people write, ‘She was guilty herself.’ Even in that case. Saltanat was trying to resist in many ways. She's a motivation for other women to resist and also to feel socially supported, because many people supported Saltanat. In Kazakhstan, women are supposed to be shy, humble, and outshined by men. But I was trying to motivate girls not to be that humble. We shouldn't be humble, and we shouldn't be afraid of what forces we have inside us.
We shouldn't be humble, and we shouldn't be afraid of what forces we have in- side us.
Even me, Kristina, a feminist, activist, director, I was fighting all the time. Still, I was afraid of that power that was inside me. And with this film, I tried not to be afraid anymore of myself and to motivate other girls in Kazakhstan to feel the same. I know that my girls in Kazakhstan, when they will watch RIVER DREAMS in a Kazakhstan premiere on a big screen, they will relate on a much deeper level. For them, it will definitely be their inspirational movie, almost like a sports motivational movie. For an international audience, of course, it cannot be because they didn't go through the same things like us girls did in Kazakhstan. I hope that the Kazakhstan audience will be influenced by the film, and I will fight till my last drop of blood to have a cinema distribution for that film. I really want to share it with the girls.
CB: You are also a producer and focused, as you said, on women's topics and women filmmakers. Maybe you can tell us about this side of your work in Kazakhstan.
KM: When I started to do RIVER DREAMS, I felt immediately like it's impossible to do it only locally, so I needed to go international. That means co-producers and international programmes, so I invested a lot of efforts into making it international. When I started to travel, I realized that in our documentary industry in Kazakhstan we don't actually know what's going on internationally. That's why we are underrepresented a lot in the world. I just started to share what knowledge I gained from the international industry with my colleagues in Kazakhstan and in Central Asia, because the industry of Central Asia is somehow connected. We all know each other. Together with my producer, we founded an NGO for female documentary filmmakers in Central Asia. And this year, at the Berlinale, you will be really surprised because we have only female cohorts everywhere. I am extremely proud to be here together with Almagul Menlibayeva. She's the biggest artist, my favorite. When I go to the museum, I just watch her works, and then I leave because it is too impressive for me. Also at the festival are three Berlinale talents: Katarina Suvorowa, Banu Ramazanova, Alina Mustafina. I am really happy about that. I guess you will have more and more women present from Central Asia because of all the work we were doing together these last three years.
GB: Thank you, Kristina. We are looking forward to you and your film soon in Berlin!
